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Monday, 01 October 2012

(One of the visual rhetoric posts born of this course. If it seems a little more basic than the rest of those posts, that’s
because it’s the first real day of class and I have to start somewhere.)

I have one goal here: to define "high fantasy" as a genre through Fellowship of the Ring. There will no doubt be academic arguments about the particulars—the true extent of Tolkien's influence, for example, or the necessity of orcs—but I want to sketch out the basic generic qualities of high fantasy in a portable manner, i.e. one that will also apply to Game of Thrones. Meaning the most commonly argued generic feature to qualify as unnecessary baggage is this one:

Works of fantasy exist in a world utterly unrelated to the one in which we live and are therefore purely escapist.

Because, at the very least, whatever work I do with Fellowship also needs to apply to Game of Thrones. That and it's just wrong. Anything written by a human being in a particular historical moment belongs to that particular historical moment even if it depicts a different or invented historical moment. The rest of the generic features of high fantasy I want to pull from Fellowship via an immanent analysis of the film itself, and what better place to begin than with maps?

Maps are important because 1) sentences like "Go north until you hit Chicago and hook a left and you'll end up California" don't make intuitive sense in fantastic worlds, and 2) the most common plot elements in fantastic works, quests and wars, are map-driven affairs. You need to know who's where and in relation to what in an invented world, and that requires special attention be paid to maps. Though the visual presentation and manipulation of maps is prevalent in high fantasy—as is evidenced both above, viewing Peter Jackson's zooming around the map of Middle Earth, or in the opening credits of Games of Thrones—it should be noted that as a film convention, it predates high fantasy as a genre. (Spielberg's clearly referencing somethinghere.) Another common element in high fantasy would be a token of power:

Like one of those. In the case of Fellowship, the ring functions as both a token and embodiment of power, whereas in Game of Thrones, the Iron Throne will merely be the token awarded to the winner of the game, but in both cases there's an item whose acquisition is certral to the plot. In Fellowship, Jackson establishes and maintains the significance of the ring by constantly zooming in on it. The frame above, for example, belongs to a sustained zoom:

But Jackson's always zooming in on the ring. To wit:

That's Frodo at The Prancing Pony, but note the difference between the sustained zoom on Sauron's hand and the interrupted zoom on Frodo's fingers. Jackson's taking advantage of our implicit understanding of filmic convention when he zooms in on Sauron's hand: he knows that such zooms are sometimes intended to convey a thought process-in-process, so by sustaining the zoom it appears as if the ring itself is thinking. The edit from the extreme close-up of the ring to Frodo's face and back to an even more extreme close-up on the ring breaks up the continuity of the zoom, meaning the ring doesn't appear to be thinking so much as conversing with Frodo. It's asking Frodo to put it on, and from one shot to the next is becoming more insistence, hence the increasing extremity of the zoom. That's a literalization of the typically figurative allure of a token of power. Who falls victim to this allure?

Depends on what you mean by "victim." In one sense, the victims are a few singularly important people through whom the narrative will be focalized; in another, it's the anonymous hordes whose fates will be decided by which of those singularly important people acquire the token of power. For example, here's a singularly important person surrounded by his anonymous horde:

You can tell Elrond's important both because of the central framing and the difference in costume: it's not just that he's not wearing a helmet, but that not wearing a helmet makes his full face available to the audience. (See here for a preview of why that's important.) It goes without saying that in terms of genre it's the singularly important people who undertake quests and the anonymous hordes that go to war. It's also worth noting the color of Elrond and his anonymous hordes, which for historical reasons typically fight against anonymous hordes that look like this:

I'm not saying that dark skin and unconventional jewelry decisions necessarily indicate that a character in a high fantasy will be less-than-noble, but neither am I denying it. (There's a reason that conversations like this one happen, and about Peter Jackson, no less.) But more on that later, because at this point it would behoove us to unify the generic conventions I've identified as succinctly as possible:

High fantasy consists of narratives in which singularly important people go on quests for tokens of power in order to facilitate or forestall wars between anonymous hordes and all of that can be tracked on maps.

That seems like a fair assessment of the genre, as established in Fellowship, don't you think? If you don't, what essential features do you think I've missed?

Monday, 10 September 2012

I've had a week to digest the mid-season finale of Breaking Bad, "Gliding All Over," and for the first time in weeks I'm not going to talkabout kitchen tables. The episode's title, "Gliding Over All," references Walt Whitman:

Gliding o'er all, through all,Through Nature, Time, and Space,As a ship on the waters advancing,The voyage of the soul—not life alone,Death, many deaths I'll sing.

How is that relevant to the episode? Not in the way people online are discussing it. For one, I keep seeing it referred to as an ordinary "poem," when in fact it appears, untitled, on the title page of Passage to India. And the interpretations I've read of its relation to the episode all focus on the "many deaths" because of Walter's increasing comfort with lethal force. But take a quick look at the actual poem that bit above introduces:

Singing my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,Singing the strong, light works of engineers,Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal, The New by its mighty railroad spann’d,The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires[.]

"Passage to India" celebrates the connectedness of the world. These canals and transcontinental railroads and undersea telegraph cables have made it visible and tangible the connections between distant peoples.

O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, [then] shall be justified,
All these hearts, as of fretted children, shall be sooth’d,
All affection shall be fully responded to—the secret shall be told;All these separations and gaps shall be taken up, and hook’d and link’d together

The voyagers and scientists and inventors create the conditions necessary to acquire a new kind of knowledge: one whose "secret ... separations and gaps" will be "hook'd and link'd together." In short: titling the episode "Gliding Over All" doesn't allude to the untitled poem's "many deaths" but to the process of acquiring an interconnected vision of the world through technology that Whitman outlines in "Passage to India." Given that Walter White and his contempories aren't in the midst of a world-shrinking communicative revolution, it stands to reason that they'll come into knowledge of how secrets are "hook'd and link'd together" differently.

Director Michelle MacLaren lets Walter have the first shot:

MacLaren opens with an extreme close-up on a fly. The shallow focus blurs the background to the extent that the only thing the audience can see is the fly. Because we want the shot to be meaningful, we begin to study the wings and shadows of this centrally positioned and obviously important fly. We try to connect this fly to some structure of meaning. Is this an allusion to "the contamination" that deviled Walter in "The Fly" and the extreme actions he and Jesse took to "clean" the lab? The camera lingers on the fly for seven seconds—long enough for these questions to arise but not long enough for them to be answer—before racking focus reveals that we're not the only ones trying to understand this fly:

Turns out the blurred "background" consisted of an extreme close-up of the top-half of Walter's face. Because the shot's level of framing is the height of a person sitting in a chair, we end up staring directly into Walter's eyes as he stares into ours. Except it can't be directly, because the fourth wall's intact, meaning Walter isn't staring past the fly, he's staring at the fly. Intently. He's studying the fly for meaning just as we did before the focus racked. The impression that he's staring through the fly—created by narrowing the depth of field in a way that blurs the fly invisible—is unsettling not only because it means that he might be menacing us, but also because it suggests that he sees some connection between himself and the fly that we failed to. He perceives the "eloquent, gentle wires" that connect him to that fly.

As well he should. There's a reason there's a fly in his office: Mike's remains rot in the trunk of Walter's car. He knows that knowledge of this fly's life-cycle could link him to Mike's murder by establishing a time of death. Even when Todd enters the room to inform him that he's disposed of Mike's car, Walter can't draw his eyes away:

This new world Walter inhabits requires a new breed of knowledge. Lest this discussion of eyeline matches and the connections they entail seem a little far-fetched, consider the last two shots in this scene:

Walter completes his intense study of the fly. When Walter stands and exits the shot to the right, MacLaren again racks the focus to reveal what the white blur behind Walter above is:

Which of course includes a taxonomic chart of flies based on the geographic distruction and rate of maturation. It is a secondary screwworm fly, meaning it only consumes necrotic tissue. Its presence connects Walter to the corpse decomposing in his trunk. We now know that this fly is unrelated to the one that taxed Walter in "The Fly," because that fly represented Walter's inability to maintain the illusion of an orderly world: he didn't know how it entered the lab and found himself powerless to remove it from it. But this fly? He knows exactly why it's there and exactly how to encourage it to leave. Its presence doesn't represent a disorderly incursion into Walter's orderly world but the extent to which Walter's come to define "orderly" differently: if he can see the connections he can control them and his mind "shall be sooth'd."

The idea established in this opening scene—that Walter has the power to acquire "secret" knowledge about connections in the world by staring at them intensely—is undermined when Skyler insists he accompany her to a storage facility. After they enter the unit, Skyler pulls aside a sheet. Instead of revealing what Skyler's uncovered, MacLaren cuts to a medium close-up of Walter's face:

Within a given episode of any well-directed television, the director will establish associations between particular shots and particular narrative elements. In the opening scene, MacLaren creates a correlation between extreme close-ups and a knowledgable mastery of the world. She combines a medium close-up of Walter with the expression on his face to indicate to us that this Walter can't fathom "these separations and gaps." He can't connect what he sees to the world he knows, and no wonder:

He's staring at a sublime amount of money. And I mean "sublime" as Kant meant it: it's a mathematical sublime, the effect of encountering an object whose greatness is unencumbered by the very idea of limitations. (Which is precisely the conversation Skyler and Walter have about how much money lives in that pile. They can't even imagine a way to count it.) Note that when the camera reversed the shot scale increased again. Walter's now in a classic medium shot here and when it reverses again:

The progressive lengthening of the shot scale suggests that Walter's becoming increasingly incapable of connecting this pile of money to the world as he understands it. Unlike the fly, this pile of money can't be categorized and put in its place: the pile lives in the storage unit because its size makes it impossible to launder its incomprehensible worth. Walter is shocked out of his fantasy of mastery-through-knowledge by an unknowable pile of money. That he decides to abandon the trade soon after encountering the sublime isn't surprising: his continued participation was predicated on his belief that he could out-understand his competitors. Now he can't even connect his labor to his capital.

These are but two moments in the episode in which this dynamic plays out. Tomorrow I'll discuss the most literal link between the episode and Whitman's paean to global shipping: the conversation between Walter and Lydia in the diner.

Friday, 07 September 2012

That seemingly innocuous statement is from the “Inspiration” subsection of the Wikipedia entry on Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain.
I write “seemingly innocuous” because it points to problems central to
both Wikipedia’s operating ethos and literary analysis. Speaking to the
latter first: this isn’t a case about what a text means or what its author intended it to mean
so we can avoid the hairier arguments about whether meaning resides
within a text or is communicated through it. This argument is about
source material. Where something came from instead of what and how it
means. According to a Wikipedia-approved secondary source, Michiko Kakutani, The Human Stain

is the story of a black man who decided to pass himself
off as white. This premise seems to have been inspired by the life
story of Anatole Broyard—a critic for The New York Times who died in 1990—at least as recounted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his 1997 book 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

Kakutani’s review meets all Wikipedia’s criteria for a “reliable source.” Except it isn’t. She said the “premise seems
to have been inspired by the life story of Anatole Broyard,” which
indicates that she’s no more familiar with the source material than
anyone else. Charles Taylor’s review
of the novel at Salon constituted the other “secondary source” for the
Broyard connection and made its way into the Wikipedia entry thus:

Taylor argues that Roth had to have been at least partly inspired by the case of Anatole Broyard, a literary critic who, like the protagonist of The Human Stain, was a man identified as Creole who spent his entire professional life more-or-less as white.

But as with Kakutani, Taylor’s evidence—mistakenly identified in the Wikipedia entry as an argument—is also pure supposition:

There’s no way Roth could have tackled this subject
without thinking of Anatole Broyard, the late literary critic who
passed as white for many years.

Saturday, 25 August 2012

Via Eileen Joy and the outstanding number of medievalists I know on Facebook, I see that Thomas Meyer's translation of Beowulf is now available. For free. It possesses a striking cover:

And though I haven't had a chance to read it yet—this translation, I mean, because I've obviously read Beowulf before—the excerpt from the publisher accords neatly with my recent obsession on the relation of form to content in film:

The eyes of Hygelac’s kin watched the wicked raider
execute his quick attack:
without delay,
snatching his first chance,
a sleeping warrior,
he tore him in two,
chomped muscle, sucked veins’
gushing blood,
gulped down his morsel, the dead man,
chunk by chunk,
hands, feet & all.
& then

As the publisher notes, "the reader is confronted with the words themselves running together, as
if in panic, in much the same way that the original passage seems in
such a rush to tell the story of the battle that bodies become confused." This is a readerly experimental mode, in which the formal experimentation is meant to assist the reader in understanding the content of the poem by replicating the experience being described. The fact that that it's not easy to parse that second stanza is the point. (I've read it about twenty times now I still keep seeing the word "dreach," if only because it sounds like a word that belongs in Beowulf.) Point being, there are far worse ways to spend your Saturday night than reading a poem in which "hot gore pour[s] upon whirlpools."

Or with supporting an endeavor which, to quote Eileen,

Every book we make, we will give away for free in electronic form,
because we believe in the richest possible artistic-intellectual
para-university commons in which everyone has access to whatever they
need and want, whenever they need and want it, and so that authors can
have the widest possible readership. But we also believe in the printed
book: as work of art, as a stylish object for one’s cabinet of
curiosities, as a material comfort [or bracing cocktail] to hold in
one’s hands, as something that takes up weight and space in the world
and adds something of beauty to the thoughts, images, and narratives we
hold in common.

Granted, like all lists, this one is shit. Its flaws include, but aren't limited to the fact that it has a size fetish, the fictional works are entirely in English, and the philosophical works are philosophical works and so why should they count? I'd scratch Being and Time and The Phenomenology of the Spirit off on that account, and add TheGuardian's suggested amendments: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbowand David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. But the amended list is still problematic, because I'm not sure anyone finds To The Lighthouse a difficult read, and Women and Men is only difficult inasmuch as it's been out-of-print for so long a paperback copy will cost you $180. McElroy's Plusis a far more difficult novel, because it's narrated from the perspective of an ornery satellite. (And it'll only run you $187.90.)

Maybe it's because of my unusual graduate school career path, but of the novels listed only The Making of Americans, Nightwood, Finnegans Wake and Gravity's Rainbow seem to me to be genuinely difficult novels. Except they're not really that difficult for the people who read them, because the people who read densely poetic world-building novels do so because enjoy doing so. I know that Gravity's Rainbow isn't for everyone, but there's a subset of the reading population for whom it's very much for. I'd have no qualms, for example, recommending it to someone who's obsessed over Infinite Jest.

A better list of the world's most difficult books would expand its purview to "the world," and it would be comprised of books that people who love difficult books find difficult, instead of ones that people who don't do. I'd suggest adding:

Anything in German or Chinese, Because SEK Can't Read German or Chinese

My list isn't exhaustive, either, but at least it suggests that The Glass Bead Gamemight be tremendously complex or The Man Without Qualitiescan match Clarissa page-for-page. Since my list is a list and, as stated above, all lists are shit, I invite you to give me the what-for in the comments.

Monday, 06 August 2012

[If this strikes you as a peculiar thing to appear on this blog, that's only because it is. It's a serialized novel that I'll be writing over the next few months.]

He remembers the first time it happened. It is his earliest memory. A. had awoken eager to walk along the banks of one of the city's three rivers—he cannot remember which one—on that morning. He cherished these rare moments to himself, far from the wailing of E., his new brother. His mother insisted he not stray too far from home, but A. knew the area well and that E. would prevent her from following him, so he ranged rather further than he led her to believe.

But on this particular morning, A. felt differently adventurous, so he followed his father to the small walled garden occupied by his family's honey bees. The bees frightened him, but he thought if he harvested a comb of honey he could prove to his father he was more worthy of attention than E. He hid behind the bushes lining the front wall and waited for his father to leave. It felt like hours before his father tired of his toil, but eventually he exited the small garden through the side gate and made for his favored tavern. A. allowed a few minutes to pass in case his father—who was always forgetting something—had forgotten something. He emerged from the bushes and approached the clay pots that housed the hives.

When the first bee crawled from the nearest pot and took flight, A. felt a strong urge to follow suit. He closed his eyes. He heard the bee circle his head twice, then once more, before he felt it settle on his shoulder. He wondered whether the bee recognized that he was his father's son and pride shuddered through his young body. The bee had tested him and not found him wanting. His mettle steeled, he opened his eyes and glanced at his shoulder. The tiny bee made no effort to sting him, nor did it seem in any hurry to leave. A. took this as a good omen and stepped closer to the hive from which his new friend had departed.

He reached the hive and peered down into it. His new friend had many old ones. They danced up and down the walls of the honey combs in what A. could discern to be a pattern. He admired the orderliness of their movement, though he could not discover its purpose. Suddenly, he heard a footfall from beyond the wall. It had the character of a sound made by someone trying not to make sound. A. knew it could not be his father, because when his father returned from the tavern his feet made no effort to hide their tread. He waited, as still and silent in the garden as his new friend was upon his shoulder. One minute passed. Two minutes. Three. He decided that he had imagined the sound and returned his attention to the pot before him.

He slipped his hand down the side of the comb and attempted, gently, to dislodge it. His efforts resulted in the arrival of even more new friends. They lit upon his arm but, unlike his first friend, they were not still and silent. They made a noise that sounded like the air before a thunderstorm felt. Their orderly dance had been disrupted and they seemed upset about its abandonment. It was not until his first friend joined the rest of his hive in voicing its displeasure that A. began to worry. And worry he did. He removed his hand from the comb and began to retract it, slowly, slowly, from the pot. His hand was nearly free when he heard the front gate slam open. The bees heard too, but they seemed not to care who had been intruding where, only that an intrusion had occurred. A. felt a thousand tiny needles stab his hand. He reeled back, but the offense had already been given and must have been quite grave because the hive did not relent. He looked to the front gate—if he could make it to the gate he could jump into the river—and only then remembered what had startled the bees in the first place.

A man in a strange black coat stood in the gateway. His hair and complexion were dark, much like A.'s own, but his whiskers were unlike any A. had ever seen. He had something in his hand. The man shouted something that A. could not understand and began to run toward him. A. tried to say something but a bee flew in his mouth. He hoped it was not his friend, but there was no time to mourn.

The man was upon him.

The world went black. The sharp pains in his hand were replaced by deep pains everywhere else. A. desperately clutched at the black but a new pain arrived every second: on his head, in his chest, to his stomach. He felt the ground beneath him go slick. He tried to slip away but the blackness was too strong. The pains continued to arrive for what must have been hours. When the blackness finally drew back, A. found himself staring at a blue sky. The bees were still panicking but appeared to have lost interest in him. His back felt wet and the world smelled of shit and sick. He tried to move but the attempt only brought more pain.

Then the man returned. He leaned over A. and grabbed him by the hair. He shouted another string of words which had no meaning to A. and shook him. A. could no longer judge which of his many pains he was feeling. When the man struck him in the face with the object in his right hand, A. ceased to care. He no longer felt pain—he had become pain. He longed for the blackness to return and, quickly enough, it did.

It was light when he awoke, in his own bed, still very much in pain. Outside the door he could hear his parents arguing, as he would many times again, about what had happened. About why A. had been near the hives and how lucky they were that his father returned when he had. He learned that there had been a confrontation, but that the man had escaped his father, and that they had not been able to find him. A. did not want to think about that. Not now, not ever again.

But think about it he would, again and again, because this was only the first time it happened.

Saturday, 16 June 2012

At 8 a.m. on the morning of 16 June 1904, two men woke up. One shaved for class and breakfasted with his usurper and an anti-Semite. The other, a Jew, purchased a pork kidney, ate it, then stared at his wife in the same bed in which she cuckolded him. He left to pick up a letter from his secret sweetheart and chatted with the people he met on his way to the baths. Once clean, he attended a funeral and saw a mysterious man.

After the funeral, he tried to place an advertisement in a local newspaper but decided more research was required, so he scooted off to the library where, unbeknown to him, the first of our two men was disquisiting on Shakespeare.

Many people walked around, including our Jew, who decided to follow his morning kidney with an afternoon liver. He ogled the barmaids and thought about his wife who, if his suspicions were correct, would soon be cuckholding him again. So he exited the bar with the pretty reminders of his pain and entered another full of anti-Semites. Fists and cans were thrown.

Troubled by thoughts of wife and ancient grievances, he wandered seaside way and publicly co-masturbated with a cripple. He later attended the birth of a child and the English language before following our first man into the red-light district. He caught up with him, himself, himself-in-drag, his dead grandfather, Nobodaddy, a giant green crab, a talking hat-stand and ducked out when the police arrived. Chastened, the two men entered a dive and met a drunken sailor. They absconded to the home of the Jew and bonded while urinating under the stars.

As 16 June 1904 came to a close, the Jew returned to his troubled marital bed and asked his wife to serve him breakfast in it tomorrow.

She considered his request but never decided one way or the other.

(Happy Bloomsday, sorry about the spoilers, and I'll return to my regularly scheduled posting about popular culture shortly.)

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

Ben Shapiro's fully embracing the words-close-to-each-othermode of argument, but he's doing so without any indication that it's not actually a serious mode of argumentation. Let me break it down for Ben: when Scott and I make that "argument," we're actually mocking the person making it. For example, you write:

We can see the clear footprint of CRT [Critical Race Theory] all over the Obama Administration.

That's an admirable job of putting the words "Critical Race Theory" and "Obama Administration" in the same sentence, but your Cheney-esque decision to hire yourself as your own editor fails you on two fronts here. First, there are words between yours words. Did Jonah Goldberg write "Liberals are all over fascism"? Of course he didn't: he wanted nothing to interfere with the backward flow of negativity from "Fascism" to "Liberal." Which brings me to my second point:

Not only do you add pointless words between your words, your filler is in the service of a metaphor that doesn't mean what you think it does. You're saying that CRT's mark upon the Obama Administration is a "clear footprint," one which can only have been left by an invisible one-legged giant. Are you claiming that CRT is an invisible one-legged giant which hopped -- one and one time only -- on the Obama Administration? At the very least, you want that thing in the plural and the present tense. You want your readers to imagine themselves being unable to see a one-legged giant hopping on the White House forever -- an animated gif which in its infinite loop resembles nothing so much as a static image of the White House.

Wednesday, 08 February 2012

One of the core assumptions of the way I teach visual rhetoric is that directors often know more than they know (or are letting on). This is because shooting schedules often don't track with air dates—for example, the episode I'm going to be discussing today, "Amy's Choice," was the seventh aired, but last one filmed in Series Five of Doctor Who, meaning that writer Gareth Roberts and director Catherine Morshead already knew what would happen in the four episodes that would follow it. The result is a kind of foreknowledge masquerading as foreshadowing: the audience experiences the latter because the writer and director possess the former.

Sound obvious? That's because that's how we think foreshadowing works. Only one problem: foreshadowing doesn't require authorial intent to be visible in a work. The Jews didn't sit around writing a book foreshadowing the eventual arrival of some guy named Jesus—they wrote a book that a bunch of Christians later interpreted to contain a number of moments when the coming of some guy named Jesus was foretold. Foreshadowing, in other words, often functions as an interpretation used to bolster the authority of a particular reader. ("What do you mean you didn't see Jesus's coming foretold in the Hebrew Bible? What are they teaching at the monastery these days?") Whereas foreshadowing was once largely a matter of readerly interpretation, thanks to some technological innovations I haven't the time nor the space to get into here—it starts with books and evolves into lending libraries and marches forward—foreshadowing is now considered to be more a matter of authorial (or directorial) intervention.

More succinctly, material that used to be wrenched from variably willing texts is now forcibly inserted into them. The classic example of the latter would be the medical drama in which someone suddenly feels a sharp pain in his or her head. The cause? Some writer forcibly inserted a tumor into it as a cheaps means of "foreshadowing" death. It's about as subtle as:

Thursday, 02 February 2012

I feel this post nips too obviously at the heels of previous ones, as I'm not going to be discussing anything I haven't discussed before. Creating a claustrophobic environment is a technical accomplishment that can be done irrespective of the environs in which one shoots a scene. Cramped quarters help, obviously, but they're not necessary. That said, the quarters in the second half of the Doctor Who episode "Time of Angels" are quite cramped, so the fact that director Adam Smith chose the default shots of his principles to be medium- and medium close-ups exacerbates what would've been a feature of every frame anyway. To wit:

That's the Doctor discussing the impending arrival of the Angels with the soldier-clerics assigned to assist him. Important here isn't merely the framing—though compositionally, the soldier-clerics bookending the Doctor can't be considered insignificant—but the tightness of it. The shallow focus leaves only those three in focus—although Amy's still visible by virtue of her ginger dress, not unlike a certain someone else—but the shot's overstuffed with folks in a way that completely obscures the background. Given that that the imminent threat isn't any of these three shot-stuffers, obscuring the background denies the audience access to whatever it is that might be lurking in the dark.

Point being, it's not just that this shot is claustrophobic, but that the claustrophobia it elicits is deliberately obfuscatory: by focusing, shallowly, on these three, the dangerous statues currently spooky-fishing* their way towards them are perforce crushed from the frame. They'll be revealed in shot/reverse shot sequences shortly thereafter, but the tight framing here makes the situation in which the Doctor et al. find themselves seem all the more hopeless. Consider:

This is the Doctor coming up with one of his patented plans, but the framing still indicates that whatever trap he's in still possesses the upper hand. It's entrapping him, not the other way around. Of course, this entrapment is but a preface to a spectacular escape, and the way in which Smith films this desperation is but a means to increase the glory that said escape entails, but the heightening of this effect is a significant moment in this season.

Rarely do the Doctor's plans include genocide, no matter how malevolent the species he's dealing with. Daleks and Cybermen he traps in other universes or the empty space between them, but this Doctor? He disappears his enemies like a Chilean dictator—erasing them from history—or outright murders the last of them if they pose a threat to Earth.** There's much more to say, but for now I'm focusing on the abreaction of Doctor and audience to the claustrophobia he and it encounter. It's cathartic, most certainly, but there's purging and then there's purging, and only one of them is just and healthy.

*I can't directly link because Comedy Central is a ... but the relevant material's at 3:58.

**As in "The Vampires of Venice," which I'm also teaching today. Stupid three hour classes.

Monday, 23 January 2012

As I was writing and writing and writing and writing about Jack London in my dissertation, I noticed something I was never able to fully incorporate into my argument: the man's obsession with hands. He not only wrote about them regularly in his fiction, but his letters are heavily peppered with references to his own "deformed" mitts. I scare-quote "deformed" because history has no record as to whether his hands were as he believed them to be—the scarred and calloused collection of fingers that his life of hard labor had created. That a leading voice for the working class was embarrassed by the signs that he'd once and long been a member of the same is one of those historical ironies that's better left for braver souls to judge. I'm more interested in the evidence. For example, were you a photographer taking a profile picture of London, he would present you with this:

Or this:

Decent shots, no doubt, but ones in which the palms of his hands have been deliberately obscured. If you were a different sort of photographer entirely—one who wanted to take pictures of famous authors in diapers, for example—London would oblige thus:

Friday, 16 December 2011

Perhaps because I teach in one of the reddest counties in the country — Orange — but every quarter, I make it clear to my students that I’m not interested in indoctrinating them. I’m left of liberal in my politics, but when I’m in the classroom, I’m interested in one thing and one thing alone: teaching these students how to construct a stronger argument. When I argue with conservatives online, I’m arguing with people who don’t know how to argue (or whose idea of arguing involves suing people who disagree with them). I tell my students I’m looking to create a better class of opponents. That I’d rather disagree with people who can state their beliefs forcefully, so that I didn’t always feel like I’m beating candy from a baby.

Since 2001, in the back of my mind, I always imagined I wanted to train my conservative students into being a wee Hitchens.

I know I’ll take flack for this, but honestly, the reason the left reviled Hitchens as strongly as it did was because it realized that it had a formidable opponent. For the most part, the left argues with the likes of Grover Norquist, whose influence is undeniable but whose skills are very much comparable.

To everybody.

Who argues.

About anything.

Hitchens was different. We can turn a phrase, but he could cant and pirouette it. As I wrote after learning he died:

I stand by it. He attacked Mother Teresa, and justifiably so, when he felt it necessary. And he embraced an unjust war, unjustifiably so, when he felt it necessary. But he also waterboarded himself, to justify himself, because he felt it was necessary, and he backed down. He was the opposition we should hate, because he makes his case so strongly; but he was also the opposition we should love, because he challenged us to make our argument in its strongest form and changed his mind to fit the facts.

Wednesday, 07 December 2011

This post is about a book review I do not understand, but as it appeals to conservatives and I've committed myself to trying to understand conservatives, I'm going to try to make sense of it.

Those who are familiar with [Stephen Hunter] will understand, and those who are not–well, what are you doing reading a book review by me when there is writing out there carved by a master?

The man carves his books? A little Old Testament for my taste, but to each his own.

“Soft Target” is the new Hunter thriller that takes place in a thriller writer’s fantasy land: America, the Mall. Appropriately, it combines the two things America loves the most: shopping and violence.

If I wrote that the author of this review would number me among the terrorists. That said, the fact that he puts quotation marks around the title can only mean he aspires to write for the New Yorker, which is fortuitous given his obvious hatred of America. (He doesn't even mention Jesus among America's favorite things, which means he's obviously at war with Christmas.)

Ray Cruz is Hunter’s new John Wayne ... The novel fleshes out so many characters and tells the story in such a thorough way that Tarantino would be jealous.

The best advice about what books to read comes from people who only watch movies.

Hunter’s greatest gift is his style, his prose. He’s been called the “populist Faulkner” and for good reason.

I have no idea what that means. Perhaps the sentences that follow that one will illuminate.

He’s no Vince Flynn and he’s no Tom Clancy. His characters inhabit a harsh world that is unforgiving and follows no set code of good wins over evil. His characters inhabit a place called reality where Hunter’s simple yet delicate and violent prose comes alive. His heroes are not perfect and his villains are never black and white.

Nothing about prose there. Maybe further on in the review?

Hunter’s novels also appeal because of their visual style, and this one is no different ... He feeds us the exact images and verbs our inner beasts need to gobble up in order to be completely consumed by the story. Hunter has perfected the craft of the thriller by keeping his prose simple a la Hemingway and giving us the details other writers shy away from, all while providing these in the context of a visually striking world only a man who reviewed films for decades could give us.

This book is like a movie! You should watch it in your brain! It's like Hemingway only also Faulknerian! They were both writers I am name-dropping!

Monday, 28 November 2011

Remember that post I wrote at the beginning of the quarter about the first episode of the fifth season of Doctor Who? Of course you don't: it's still in my draft folder. The whole point of that post—which I'll briefly recapitulate here—is that there's something unusual about a man sporting tweed and bowtie playing the cultural equivalent of Superman. Spandex and tights? That's American. But tweed and a bowtie? That's academic, and surely no one wants the weight of the world resting on academic shoulders.

Unless, of course, you're English. In which case it makes perfect sense. So, to begin that post I never posted, here's Superman coming out of the closet and into his own:

Note that Richard Donner's American version of making manifest the hero's heroism involves stripping in public, entering a random office building, and emerging in jammies and a cape. The English version of this scene maps particularly well onto its American equivalent, with the one exception that director Adam Smith attempts to out-America America and film it in the sort of long tracking shot Scorsese favors. I'm only going to show the end of the first (Fig. 1) and the end of the second (Fig. 7) tracking shot, because the reaction shots in between are actually more crucial:

Monday, 24 October 2011

I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time.

reality-bending metaphysical freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag; metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative; a touch of feel-good self-improvement rhetoric; faith in the the power of pop and popularity to do magic; and skinny bald men who are stand-ins for Morrison himself, heroically conquering sadness and making the world evolve. (Reading Comics 258)

If those two descriptions seem at odds, that's because they are. Morrison is a talented but unintegrated artist. What do I mean? He can be as aggressively annoying as Wolk's flattering account of him suggests. Incorporating proxies of himself into narratives about the nature of narratives and claiming that magic makes these metaphorical selves visible? That is, to quote my advisor, pure "postmodern gee-whiz wankery." It's cleverness for the sake of being hailed as King Clever, and it grates on my every last nerve because it's so clinical and intellectualized.

AND YET.

I came to graduate school to study the works of James Joyce, whose complex wankery far outstrips anything Morrison's attempted, much less accomplished. So why does Morrison bother me in a manner Joyce doesn't? The short answer is that, at his best, Morrison doesn't bother me at all. When is he at his best? As Alyssa notes, it's when he's stripped a story to its emotional core and presented its complexities not as worthy subjects in and of themselves, but as natural consequences of a human narrative. Of course, the protagonists of these "human" narratives are rarely human: in All-Star Superman, it's Superman; in We3, it's a trio of weaponized house-pets.

That is to say: Morrison seems to have a problem elevating actual humans to a position worthy of simple human sympathy. A kidnapped pet or an orphaned alien are worthy of sympathy because they aspire to be more than their outsider status allows them to be. But an average human being? He or she is what he or she is—short of a magical authorial intervention that's as likely to land him or her in Sade's castle as provide anything resembling hope or help. The only transcendence average people can acquire is by proxy, e.g. Lois's "acquisition" of Superman's powers on her birthday.

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

Everybody loves The Wire and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series. I love The Sopranos. Deadwood, which didn't last long, was a series I liked a lot; it had more filthy language than I've ever heard on television anywhere in my life, but it was brilliantly written. I like some of what is on now, like Breaking Bad and Dexter.

Ever since then, his Twitter feed's been mighty entertaining. In particular, he implicitly claims that The Wire is "just a police series" but Entourage is something more. (I'm not sure exactly what that something is, but it must have to do with the fact that, as a celebrity himself, he could relate to the Vince and his crew on a profound level inaccessible to those of us who found the show and its characters vapid and humorless.) Rushdie's dismissal of The Wire as "mere" genre fiction couldn't be more poorly timed, coming as it does on the tail end of Colson Whitehead's dismissal of genre fiction as an operative category in contemporary literature. Genre only matters, Whitehead argues, to people incapable of seeing past it. One would assume that a magic realist like Rushdie would understand that.

But no.

He'll watch Game of Thrones, but only because it qualifies as research:

I watched all that because if I am going to work in this field, I need to know what it is going on. I have been making myself have whole-series marathons to get the point of how it goes. I will soon start writing my little series.

Saturday, 13 August 2011

I’ve stayed my pen about the riots in London because they’re happening in what I consider to be my London. What I mean is: when that Eyjafjallajoekull erupted andtrapped me in England, I spent about 80 percent of the time staying with a friend in Crouch End, and while my friend taught or held office hours or sat through faculty meetings, I would wander the streets of North London. So strong is my affinity for the area that I ended up supporting Tottenham—and you can see where this is going. I’ve invested in the area in the way that only an idle victim of circumstance can: fully cognizant of the illegitimacy of his claim upon it, but feeling an abiding connection to it anyway. Knowing this, Michael Sayeau—who wrote eloquently about his experience for n+1—recommended I follow the riots via Twitter, and so I spent an anxious evening reading about the destruction of a place I have no right to care for as greatly as I do.

One of the most surreal aspects of watching the riots unfold on Twitter and a grid of Twitpics was that it quickly became apparent that people weren’t simply commenting on the looting, they were actively coordinating it. ”We should hit this shop next,” one person would write, only to be shouted down by a group of people who thought it more prudent to hit another shop instead. It quickly became apparent that an unusual organization had emerged through the clutter of social media: it operated openly and encouraged criminality, all while imposing order on a what otherwise would’ve appeared to be the random development of a conflagration.

This use of technology to outwit and outstrip a government’s ability to react to escalating unrest should have immediately struck me as familiar, being that it’s the premise of Adam Roberts‘s novel New Model Army—a book in which I’m not only thanked in the acknowledgments, but in which I believe I make an appearance. (Adam denies it, but if the crazy academic in a brown suit and a Watchmen t-shirt isn’t me, he at least belongs to my tribe.) Point being: the connection between the acephalous organization of Adam’s radically democratic military organizations and what I was witnessed on Twitter last week speaks to the power of speculative fiction and, more frighteningly, the pace at which contemporary society makes good on its speculations.

Sunday, 27 March 2011

Given that I have all of four days to wrap up the Winter quarter and vault into the Spring, lesson-planning's taken the bulk of my time of late. I'm thinking, as per the tentative title of this post, of delving into meta-fictional accounts of the origin of comic "heroism" this quarter, and have come up with the following (largely other-side-of-the-pond) syllabus:

"The Origin of Batman" (excerpt from Batman 47) - Bob Kane

You begin with the almost-begin: this is the first time Joe Chill's mentioned, by which I mean implicated, in the death of Wayne's parents. There's an earlier reference to their murder in Detective Comics 39 (November 1939), but it's abridged in a way that makes the story itself unrecognizable. (Which is, yes, the very opposite of the point I make below about Morrison's All-Star Superman, but that's because you can't already assume an audience is familiar with a story before it's ever been told.)

Batman: Year One (comic) - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

See what I did there? In terms of comparative styles, now I can introduce Asterios Polyp. To wit, Mazzucchelli in Year One:

Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

Those aren't as different as I thought they'd be. ("I have a hole in my cape," you can almost imagine Mazzucchelli's distraught Wayne saying.) But outside the cleanliness of the lines, there's little to make you believe that the person responsible for the first image would later be responsible for the second ... and that's a belief I'm going to try to disabuse my students of.

Batman Begins (film) - Christopher Nolan

Because you think I'm capable of teaching this course without bringing up Nolan's film? I didn't think so.

Planetary/Batman (comic) - Warren Ellis

This'll be the fourth re-telling of the Batman origin myth, only this time endlessly looped. The point, rhetorically speaking, in having them encounter four versions of the same story is 1) to emphasize that there's some inherent appeal there, but 2) to demonstrate that even if a story has inherent appeal, the manner in which a given rhetor presents it actually matters. The raw stuff is all well and good, but the power's in the telling.

Planetary #1 -10 (comic) - Warren Ellis

They're billed as "the archeologists of the impossible," after all, and Ellis's engagement with both the history of the genre and its conventions could hardly find a more suitable course to be taught in.

All-Star Superman (comic) - Grant Morrison

I'm thinking of teaching only the first page of the first issue, as it's the most brilliantly compact origin story ever, and after that Morrison's metafictional games might be a bit too much for students to handle. There's a genius to its concision, i.e. the manner in which it boils down a story everyone already knows to its barest bones, and then presents them to a knowing audience in a way that is, quite frankly, moving. (Sorry, sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One (comic) - Alan Moore

Introducing students to old-school, public-domain heroism ... plus plenty of opportunities to talk with my largely Asian-American classes about how "The Yellow Peril" is depicted.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (comic) - Mike Mignola

Being an origin story that involved someone other than Batman, so the students can reevaluate their premises about mythos in American culture at the end of the quarter, etc. etc.

Hellboy (film) - Guillermo Del Toro

Etc. etc. That's quite a bit of material for a composition class, and textually speaking—i.e. despite it being all film and comics—it's historically and allusively dense to boot. But it seems doable. That said, if there's anything very obvious I'm missing, feel free to point it out ... until Tuesday, because believe it or not, that's when the Spring quarter starts.